OpenStreetMap
Still influenced by my proposal for https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:settlement_type=crannog, I’ve looked at how historic settlements are mapped on OSM. There are three more or less “right” ways to do it (and so many wrong ones…). The three options are
* map as historic= [whatever type of settlement]
* map as https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:historic=archaeological_site + site_type= [whatever type of settlement]
* map as https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:historic=archaeological_site + https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:site_type=settlement + settlement_type= [whatever type of settlement]
The distribution today1 was (in reversed order from above, sorry):
| settlement type/ form | settlement_type=* | site_type=* | historic=* |
| ringfort | 131 | 2 | 0 |
| crannog | 82 | 0 | 2 |
| hut_circle | 24 | 348 | 1 |
| oppidum | 8 | 15 | 3 |
| city | 6 | 612 | 16+(messy mapping) 2 |
| village | 3 | 11 | 58+ (messy mapping3) |
| town | 2 | 0 | 12 (+ 3 “ghost_town”) |
| longphort | 1 | 0 | 0 |
| rundling | 1 | 0 | 0 |
| hut_site | 1 | 0 | 0 |
| hut | 0 | 0 | 12 |
| vicus | 0 | 24 | 0 |
| shieling | 0 | 0 | 20 371 |
| settlement | n/a | 3 788 | ~25 |
In my opinion, historic= [whatever type of settlement] should only be used when the remains are still recognizable as buildings, like a ghost town or some sort of preserved settlement used as a museum (or “visitor experience”, as they’re now known), like some of the Pioneer towns in America.
Everything else I would classify as an https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:historic=archaeological_site, and I personally would like to be able to classify settlements as such and then use sub-classification, if they are known. The high number of https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:site_type=settlement supports that in my opinion.5
On a side note: I’m strongly opposed to using values like “roman_villa” and “celtic_oppidum”, because with a lot of those terms, they are mostly associated with that one historic:civilization anyway, and that information should only be stored under that key.
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This does not take all the wrongly tagged Japanese and Russian occurrences into account which tend to turn out to be names or descriptions once translated. ↩
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i.e. tags like “ancient_city” etc (“ancient” should go into
historic:civilizationwith more precision. ↩ -
i.e. tags like “deserted_village” etc ↩
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A surprisingly low number. ↩
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Bear in mind that most ringforts and crannogs were mapped by myself. ↩
Discussion
Comment from dieterdreist on 17 October 2022 at 18:59
Unlike you, I am not strongly opposed to tags like roman_villa or roman_road but I agree there is some unneeded redundancy in combination with historic:civilization, and we would ideally not tag like this, thing is these verbose/specific alternatives are used more frequently.
Comment from b-unicycling on 17 October 2022 at 19:06
I think that is because people still think with paper maps in mind, where all the information had to be in the label. This is after I’ve seen people take over a label from a paper map reading “Giant’s Grave” as the “historic” value. Obviously, there were no giants in history, so this is a local name for some megalithic tomb. (I’ve seen the same in Italian.)
Comment from b-unicycling on 17 October 2022 at 19:10
I would make an exception in cases like “Roman villa”, because villas are still being built, but the meaning has changed. Nobody is still building oppida/ oppidums.
Comment from dieterdreist on 17 October 2022 at 20:16
Yes I have also seen some historic=unique_name, naturally this doesn’t work out, so I believe sooner or later they will be tagged with generalized tags, and in the meantime you can consider it historic=yes even not understanding the name.
Comment from b-unicycling on 17 October 2022 at 21:09
Usually the name contains something like “burial ground” or “palace” or “castle”, so I could be more precise than “historic=yes”.